You can try to not use a search engnie at all, but the Web relies a lot on them. If that’s really what you want, you’re limited to surfing. Go to a site, follow links, and hope you get where you need to go. Surfing is great for finding things you didn’t know you were looking for, and not so great for finding particular things you need information on. For that, either try whatever libraries you have access to or cave and use a search engine.

There are plenty of search engines that aren’t Google. Some don’t use the same search index (big list of web pages that it shows you when you search stuff). I currently use Qwant as my primary engine, and before that i used Startpage. I’m also fond of Marginalia when a big, normal engine isn’t giving me helpful results.

Or you can ask people, like you said. Forums, chatrooms, whatever Lemmy is, maybe email somebody if you think they know stuff about whatever field you’re interested in. Or you could sit down in a coffee shop with a sign that says “Tell me about electrical engineering” or whatever it is you want to know, and see how that goes.

Wikipedia is good, if you don’t mind that it has a search bar with an index consisting of its own pages. You shouldn’t trust everything you read there, but every good article (and most bad ones) cites sources, and you can follow those citations.